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What does "Later Life" mean? A simple answer is the last couple - or several! - decades of someone's life. If we pick age 60 as the starting point, that's a lot of people in Santa Clara County, and growing (it's estimated that by 2030, nearly one in 4 people in our county will be aged 60 and older.)
What do common issues in later life have to do with aging well?
You'll see a lot written about "healthy aging", or "aging well", or "senior wellness". How happy and capable we are in later life depends on many different factors, and one person's aging well might not look at all like another's.
Amidst all this variation, though, our bodies change as we age in some predictable ways. Common physical changes may challenge the habits of a lifetime, so we need to adapt new habits to cope better with low vision or hearing, different reactions to high or low temperatures, and so on. We may need to learn new ways to keep our balance, or to keep moving easily. Sleep patterns change as we age. So do social or family patterns, sometimes leading to loneliness, grief, depression. Many people are terrified of losing memory, or changing cognition - but that's not inevitable.
It's entirely possible to age well even with a chronic illness, to cope with the common issues of later life -- and to have happy, fulfilled years in ways that matter to you.
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